First and foremost, Agendrix is us, as in, the company. We’re 15 people from Quebec, Canada, united by a common, deep competitive instinct.

Agendrix is also the name of our main SaaS product. It’s an online employee scheduling and time and attendance software. In a nutshell, it’s a way for businesses of streamlining schedule and employee work hours management.

Though Agendrix has only been around for 3 years, our userbase has grown from 0 to more than 40,000 users across 24 countries.

Q: Can you give us insights into your products?

A: Agendrix brings together a couple complementary features to form a versatile schedule management platform. Its most notable and popular component for managers is the schedule planner. This one lets you create schedules in seconds and send everything to your employees right on their phone. The schedule is online, meaning everything is always up to date for everyone the moment changes are made and approved.

On the employee side of things, our app lets workers manage themselves somewhat by allowing them to submit their own availability and requests, such as shift swaps. This means all the manager has to do is accept or decline requests, no phone or call needed. And anytime changes are made, those concerned receive a push notification or email, based on their preferences. In other words, we make sure everyone always knows what’s going on.

Another big component is what we call “Time and Attendance”. This module keeps track of employee clock-in and clock-out hours to build time sheets automatically. Managers have a couple ways of setting up how clocking works, including by mobile phone or on a computer or tablet. If your employees use a mobile phone to clock, you can even define a clocking radius so that they actually have to be at work to clock in. Which is a real bummer for cheaters.

Many of our clients were used to building schedules with the prehistoric Excel spreadsheet before making the switch. The biggest issue with this broad office software is that it’s not focused. This means you often end up with a tonne of unnecessary features to sift through. And the moment you try to do anything remotely advanced, you can’t.

Employee scheduling software streamline scheduling by giving you only the features you actually need. This lets us deep think these features until they’re as intuitive and smooth as possible. In practice, this means better accessibility, faster learning, and fewer mistakes to ultimately be more efficient.

Connectivity is what really defines scheduling software, though. You get to take information that’s typically bound to the physical world – such as a paper sheet dangling on the employee lounge wall – and make it accessible 100% of the time. This means everyone always has access to the latest version of the schedule. Updates are shared and communicated instantly and hassle-free. Time sheets build and calculate themselves. Discrepancies are reported automatically.

Some of our clients now spend just a few minutes where they once spent hours building and managing schedules. Their monthly Agendrix subscription ends up paying for itself in a week’s time.

Q: Can you talk about how mobile phones are now part of scheduling process?

A: Nowadays, pretty much everybody has a mobile phone, right? They’ve more or less become an extension of who we are. It makes sense, too: humans are technologically driven entities, and electronic devices are much better at remembering and sharing information than we are. And since proper schedule management happens to be about managing information, using technology to bridge the gap felt like a natural thing to do.

There’s a lot that can go wrong with schedules. Forgetting leaves, miscalculating wages, and overbudgetting are but a few examples of potentially expensive manager mistakes. Likewise, employees can (and will!) forget work shifts or bother managers ad infinitum with small requests. This is where electronic devices, particularly mobile phones, come into play. They prevent all of these issues by automating those processes where human error is possible and ensuring everyone is always up to date, no matter where they are. And this, without interrupting workflows.

A: Our client base primarily includes small and medium-size businesses. Since the idea behind Agendrix was to better connect employees and managers, we made sure our app was as simple as it could be. This means we see Agendrix used by the older folk on the verge of retirement as much as by the teenager whose hand is glued to her phone 24/7.

Employers who deal with variable weekly schedules, particularly in the retail and restaurant industries, are among our biggest fans. Those who manage several locations or work sites are really happy with our Time and Attendance module. Besides these examples, we serve customers across a wide range of industries. As it turns out, most businesses can benefit from proper scheduling.